When Jax Braggiotti was 11 years old, she woke up one morning to a strange sight: when she looked at her door frame, it seemed as if it was bent inward. She closed her left eye and realized she had a huge grey spot in the middle of her right eye that was blocking her center vision.

A week later, the Long Beach local was warming up for a softball game when she experienced double vision for the first time.

“At that point, my parents got worried and took me to an optometrist,” she said. “He looked in my eyes, quickly sat back and told me he had never seen anything like this before and to get to a retina specialist immediately.”

She would later be diagnosed with Multifocal Choroiditis, a rare disorder characterized by inflammation with swelling of the eyes and multiple lesions in the choroid, a layer of blood vessels and connective tissue between the white of the eye and the retina, according to the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).